BOB ABERNETHY, host: Now we have a conversation with Jim Wallis about his new book. It is called “On God’s Side,” and it’s an appeal to overcome the country’s problems by serving the common good. Wallis is a religious activist, preacher, and editor of Sojourners magazine. He joins us from New York. And our managing editor, Kim Lawton, is here with me in the studio. Jim, welcome.

JIM WALLIS (Sojourners): Welcome, Bob. Thank you.

ABERNETHY: What is your definition of the common good?

WALLIS: You know, people are asking me what the common good is and what it means to be on God’s side, and neither has certain answers, but I think they’re the right questions. Let me give you my favorite from the book. This is from Catholic social teaching. I’ll read it right from them: “The common good is the whole network of social conditions which enable humans and groups to flourish. All are responsible for all.” So I was taking a sabbatical to write this book and watching the news at night and saw we had forgot this idea of the common good, and yet that’s what our traditions tell us.

ABERNETHY: Jim, who says what the common good is?

WALLIS: Well, the common good is found in all of our faith traditions—definitions like the Catholic one there, the black churches. I found it back to John Chrysostom in the fourth century. So it’s deeply in all our traditions, and the moral foundation of it is to love your neighbor as yourself. Now, in secular democratic traditions, it’s also there in the Golden Rule: treat others the way you want to be treated. So it’s a fundamental principle of how you treat your neighbor, and then who your neighbor is.

KIM LAWTON, managing editor: Jim, one thing I’ve noticed is that different people will say they have different ways of reaching the common good. So, for example, in some of the budget debates that I know you were involved in, you had some people saying the common good is served this way, and other people still using that language but coming up with a very different policy position. How do you reconcile that?

WALLIS: Mike Gerson, who’s a Washington Post columnist and was a George Bush speech writer, has a comment on the book. He says, “Jim and I might disagree on some policy decisions, but his call for an active consideration of the common good is more timely and urgent than ever.” I’m saying let’s have that debate. On the principle of the budget that you raise, the principle from all our traditions is you have to protect the poor and vulnerable, so you can’t reduce a deficit by increasing poverty. People on both sides could make that pledge, and then we could find a way to reform the public sector and the private sector in ways that protect the poor and vulnerable.

ABERNETHY: Jim, within many of the churches there has been a kind of a split between those who emphasize salvation and, on the other hand, those who emphasize trying to build the kingdom on Earth now. Where are you on this? On both sides?

WALLIS: Well, I’m an evangelical, which means I want to take what the Bible says seriously. And then you look at the early chapters of Matthew, you see a kingdom breaking in that’s supposed to change the world and us with it. So in the book I’ve got a long conversation about your question. It says the kind of Jesus we believe in will determine the kind of Christians we’re going to be. So I’m critical of what I call the atonement-only Gospel, where there’s no kingdom, there’s no teaching, there’s no change of anything but ourselves. That’s not what the scriptures teach, but that’s certainly in the church I grew up in. So a balanced—the change as individuals, I want to be changed in my life, but also we’re supposed to change the world. Jesus came to change the world and us with it.

LAWTON: And Jim, along those lines, in your book you do talk a lot about that the common good is served not just through policies and politics, but also in individual decisions people make in their families, their lives. How does that—how does how I live my life, in my personal life, affect the common good?

WALLIS: I’m so glad you asked that question, because a lot of people say I can’t change Washington or Wall Street. I’m saying the choices we make about how we treat our neighbors, those around us, our poor neighbors, those we may have to reach out to, our immigrant neighbors, our Muslim neighbors, our gay neighbors—those choices will change the culture. We’re seeing the one place Washington’s getting it right is around immigration reform, and why? Because from the outside they’re hearing the faith community say this, for us, is a moral issue, it’s a Gospel issue, and it’s changing our politics. We’re going to get that. All we’re going to get this year, I think, is that, but it’s going to happen because of the common good being practiced outside of Washington. It comes last to Washington.

ABERNETHY: But is it a movement, Jim, that you’re trying to put together, a movement that essentially is a national lobby, or is it, as Kim was talking about, what people do in their own lives?

WALLIS: No, it’s what people do in their own lives. Like William Wilberforce led the abolishment movement, but it wasn’t the parliamentarians. It was the movement that swept the country. So what we do in our own lives, and so I mean households. I got whole chapters on being dads and moms and parents, and I’m a little league baseball coach. Those kind of life choices are what build social movements, and that’s the only thing that ever changes politics. What we do in our own lives is what the book is about, and how that can change politics and culture, and just the first sentence of the book says, “Our life together can be better,” and that’s the hunger I think people are feeling now.

LAWTON: And Jim, just very briefly, you’ve been talking about some of these ideas for a long time. Other people have been talking about the common good. What makes you think things are different now, that’s there a new receptivity now?

WALLIS: Well, first of all, watching the political narrative at night after being all day on the sabbatical I took—quiet and reflection and study and writing—the more I watched it at night, I wasn’t engaging it, the depressing—it was polarized, paralyzed, hate, fear, anger, and I saw we’ve lost something very fundamental. So I think this can take us back to this ancient idea that can bring us together and find common ground for the common good, and especially a new generation wants to give their lives for the common good. Our audiences are half under thirty everywhere I go, and they want to give their lives for this, and that’s what I think’s going to make a difference long term.

TIM O’BRIEN, correspondent: There are some things the government must do, and the first reason for taxes is to pay for them. Beyond that there is wide debate over how taxes can be efficient and fair and what kind of society they should promote.

PROFESSOR GREG MANKIW (Professor of Economics, Harvard University): People on the left think that the tax code is not nearly redistributive enough, think that the rich are really getting away with murder. People on the right think that it’s not the job of government to be redistributing income and that the tax code we have is too progressive.

O’BRIEN: Greg Mankiw was the chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers in the second Bush administration.

MANKIW: It’s a difference of values, of what you think government should be. In coming to any sort of tax reform those different values are going to collide, and there’s no easy way to sort of reconcile these very different philosophical positions about what the scope of government should be.

Professor Michael Sandel teaching at Harvard: How should income and wealth and opportunities and the good things in life be distributed?

O’BRIEN: The collision of the competing views of the role of government is the grist for a very popular course at Harvard taught by Michael Sandel, a professor and political philosopher.

PROFESSOR MICHAEL SANDEL (Professor of Government, Harvard University): The main purpose of a tax system is to raise revenue for the common good, for the public good. That’s its purpose. But it has to do so in a way that is fair, that involves shared sacrifice, because really it’s a matter of sharing the burdens of a free society and of a good society. That’s, morally speaking, what taxes are about. So unless a tax system meets the test of fairness, none of its other advantages really matter.

O’BRIEN: For Peter Wehner, a former deputy assistant to President George W. Bush, the issue is freedom.

PETER WEHNER (Senior Fellow, Ethics and Public Policy Center): This country was founded on liberty. It wasn’t founded on income equality. And there is a certain view, which I subscribe to, which says that people ought to be able to keep much or most of what they earn and to have the government in the business of taking it and deciding how it, government, will spend it rather than you as an individual I think is flawed, and I think it’s contrary to much of the American tradition, and I happen not to think that it’s consistent with ethical or moral or religious traditions as well.

O’BRIEN: But according to Michael Sandel, fairness—“sharing the burdens of a free and good society”—may compel a significant redistribution of wealth.

SANDEL: Some people do work harder than others, but what’s reflected in the vast income inequalities that we’ve seen in recent years is not hard work primarily. School teachers work hard, bus drivers work hard, kindergarten teachers, daycare workers—they work hard. Do they work less hard than hedge fund managers and Wall Street bankers who reap hundreds and thousands of times what they do in the market economy? Most of the wage differences, most of the income differences have very little to do with differences in effort. Most of them have to do with supply and demand and with the qualities that our society happens to value, and a lot of this is no doing of the people who are lucky enough to have those talents and those abilities to wind up on top. And if that’s true, then it seems to me there is an obligation for those who are affluent, those who succeed under this system, to share their bounty with those who through no fault of their own are less well off.

O’BRIEN: In Alabama, which has its share of “less well-off,” families falling below the poverty level still pay income taxes and a hefty nine percent tax on groceries, while many wealthy property owners pay next to nothing in property taxes. Schools suffer, and some families find it even harder, because of taxes, to put food on the table. The Alabama legislature is composed almost entirely of Christians, but to one critic the state’s tax policy stands Christian values on their head.

PROFESSOR SUSAN PACE HAMILL (Professor of Law, University of Alabama): The moral principles of Judeo-Christian ethics demand that our taxes raise a level of revenue embracing the reasonable opportunity of all and that the burden be allocated in a moderately progressive way.

O’BRIEN: Susan Hamill is seminary trained, a United Methodist, a tax attorney, and a law professor at the University of Alabama, and she’s made a name for herself crusading for tax reform in Alabama based on Judeo-Christian ethics—the Bible.

HAMILL: The Bible, first and foremost, absolutely forbids oppression—this is where I got started with this in Alabama—forbids oppression. What is oppression? Oppression is taking a person who’s already down, who is struggling, who is vulnerable and making their situation worse, actively doing so.

O’BRIEN: The idea that those who write our tax laws should be in any way guided by religious beliefs has been greeted with a degree of skepticism by some leading economists, like Greg Mankiw.

MANKIW: I don’t think one can go straight from any sort of religious view to what an optimal tax system looks like, but in terms of thinking about fairness and what’s the role for government—sure, I think all of our values come into play.

O’BRIEN: There’s no debate that tax laws should be fair, but how in a pluralistic society such as ours do we even define the word “fair”? And assuming we can define it, how far should the government go using tax dollars to promote fairness?

WEHNER: The aim of tax policy is to generate economic growth. A rising tide lifts all boats. I don’t think that, as a general proposition, using tax policy to create fairness or equality works. To take money from the rich, money that they have earned because they have worked hard, is not by itself just, and again, if you take money from the rich beyond a certain point you’re going to create disincentives for wealth creators, and that’s going to have a huge effect on the poor as well.

O’BRIEN: One remedy championed by Steve Forbes in his run for the presidency in 1996 is a flat tax—17 per cent across the board, scrapping the current complicated and loophole-laden IRS code. The flat tax may have antecedents in the religious tradition of tithing, where each person gives the same percentage regardless of income.

MANKIW: Well, I think a flat tax would for sure be more efficient, and I think the strongest argument in favor of a flat tax has to do with efficiency.

O’BRIEN: Many economists, like Harvard’s Greg Mankiw, say the government should rely less on taxing income and more on a value-added tax on consumer goods, a form of flat tax found in much of Europe.

MANKIW: It’s a consumption tax rather than an income tax, so it does not tax savings. So if I earn some money and I put it in the bank and I don’t spend it, it doesn’t get taxed until I take it out and spend it later on whatever I buy. And I think there’s a lot of economists have argued over the years that consumption is a better basis for taxation than income, because consumption is actually what we’re enjoying. And also saving is a part of economic growth, so if we exempt saving until it’s later consumed, it’s going to tend to promote economic growth. So I think there’s a strong case to be made for using consumption as the basis for taxation.

O’BRIEN: If, however, sacrifices are to be shared equally, some adjustment would have to be made for those who have little money at all and are hard pressed to cover even the most basic necessities. Our tax code may be the best measure of what kind of a people we are and what kind of a country we have created. The late American philosopher John Rawls defined a just society as one you would want to live in, even if you did not know in advance what your place in it would be—whether you would be rich or poor, male or female, or what your race or I.Q. would be. In his course at Harvard, Professor Sandel also questions whether a country committed to equal opportunity should allow the wealthy to pass on their vast fortunes to their children and grandchildren.

SANDEL: If we believe that everyone should have an equal chance to work hard and aspire and succeed, then it’s very difficult to justify that children of wealthy parents should have a huge advantage even before they start. The estate tax, quite apart from raising revenue, is a way a society says we want to give everyone equal opportunity as far as we can, and we don’t want to give a huge advantage to people, to let them start way before everyone else simply because they had the good luck, or the good judgment, to be born to affluent parents.

WEHNER: If your parents, upon dying, want to give their children the money rather than going to the government, that’s a perfectly reasonable thing to do. Is it fair to the children who by birth might get that money that it’s taken from them and it’s given to the government? I don’t think that there is an ethical or moral imperative to do that.

O’BRIEN: Even if political philosophers and economists could agree on the fairest and most efficient method of taxation, that surely doesn’t mean it will ever happen, because of the power of special interests, such as homeowners.

MANKIW: So why should the tax code subsidize home ownership, which is eventually at the expense of renters? On the other hand, trying to get rid of that is very hard, because homeowners think they’ve become entitled to it, so there’s no question that that’s going to be a hard one to get rid of, but it’s also the right thing to do. It’s easy for me to talk about tax reform. I have tenure. The typical congressman has to get reelected every two years, and so that makes their set of constraints much more troublesome and difficult to navigate than mine.

O’BRIEN: What the tax debate makes clear is just how divided the country is over how to define the role of government and the values it should promote.

]]>Three weeks after a congressional hearing was held on the radicalization of American Muslims, Sen. Richard Durbin (D-IL) held a March 29 hearing on the civil rights of American Muslims. Watch excerpts from remarks made by Sen. Durbin, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT), Sen. Jon Kyl (R-AZ), Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights Thomas Perez, President and Executive Director of Muslim Advocates Farhana Khera, and Cardinal Theodore McCarrick. Edited by Emma Mankey Hidem.

BOB ABERNETHY, anchor: As Congress assembles a health care reform package, a longtime expert on medical ethics writes in a recent issue of Commonweal magazine that there has been an important idea missing from the debate—the concept of the common good. The expert is Daniel Callahan, founder and now president emeritus of the Hastings Center. His new book is Taming the Beloved Beast. He joins us from New York.

Mr. Callahan, welcome. How do you define the common good?

DANIEL CALLAHAN (Senior Researcher and President Emeritus, The Hastings Center): I mean by the common good our life together, the stranger and the neighbor, the friend we know and the person—people we don’t know. The common good I think of as essentially a social concept. Aristotle said human beings are social animals, and I think that is true, and it seems to me that as we think about our own life, either in politics or health reform, we have to think not only of ourselves and our family but also of the neighbor, the stranger, the person we don’t know, and somehow knit that together into some meaningful whole.

ABERNETHY: And was there a time in this country’s history when the idea of the common good was very strong, very prevalent?

CALLAHAN: Well, in a curious sense, its not like—Europe has a much stronger sense of the common good, in great part because of their wars and other terrors they have gone through. In this country I think there has been ambivalence and uncertainty about the common good. We really—freedom has been our main catchword, the main value we have gone by, justice a little bit less so. But the idea of working together for the common good is something—it certainly is come at in times of warfare, but it’s sporadic. It often doesn’t mark our common life together, and a great number of people really, I think, are just enormously ambivalent. They want to help the poor, but of course they don’t want to raise their taxes. They’d like health care reform and they see the need for cutting costs, but they don’t want to give up anything themselves. So we are very torn on the common good, I think.

ABERNETHY: Is that why it has been so difficult to put together health care reform, because nobody wants to give up anything?

CALLAHAN: That’s a very powerful part of it. Now some of it is different politics. Republicans and Democrats differ on the role of government. But it is very striking that even the Democrats, who started out talking about cost control, immediately backed down and said of course we can’t take anything away from people. But, of course, we can’t control costs unless we do, unfortunately, take some things away from people.

ABERNETHY: And that’s the idea in your new book, Taming the Beloved Beast, isn’t it, that technology, medical technology, has become so important, but also so expensive, that there have got to be some kind of limits, some kind of controls. Is that right?

CALLAHAN: Exactly right. Technology is probably the main thing that drives up health care costs in this country. Everybody loves it. Doctors love it, patients love it, and it’s part of American culture, and it’s done wonderful things. It keeps us alive longer, it keeps us healthier. Yet, at the same time, the cost of it all is beginning to really corrode, even destroy, the heath care system. It’s one of those wonderful cases of when is enough enough, and when does a good thing turn into a bad thing?

ABERNETHY: And, very quickly, are we going to get a good, in your judgment, a good health care reform?

CALLAHAN: I think we’ll get a good reform in the sense that we’ll probably see a much enlarged coverage of the uninsured, and we’ll see certain changes, improvements in health care for children and Medicaid. At the same time, we will not be able to control costs under the present bill, and I think that’s going to create enormous problems in the very immediate future.

]]>In this exclusive online conversation, Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly managing editor Kim Lawton talks with Rev. Jim Wallis, editor of Sojourners magazine and author of THE GREAT AWAKENING, about how the financial crisis may affect the presidential campaign. Wallis describes how the candidates should be framing the moral dimensions of the crisis and what principles he thinks voters should be considering at the ballot box.

]]>In a wide-ranging interview with Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly managing editor Kim Lawton, the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Denver comments on the responsibility of American Catholics to be involved in political life, the controversy over withholding Communion from pro-choice Catholic politicians, and more.